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Thursday, December 31, 2015

If you are leading a workshop and the participants are working on laptops, try using sticky notes as a way to gauge where everyone is in the process of completing the assigned task. UCLA teacher Miriam Posner, in A better way to teach technical skills to a group, describes how assigning students to small groups combined with the sticky note strategy serves her students well. This could easily be adapted for work not on computers.

From murder to redemption, from jazz to rock and roll, from striptease to Kiss, from Mister T to misadventure, from business-as-usual to anything-goes, the documentary, like The Bayou itself, will arouse the senses. (The IDA)

Relive the concerts or learn about this famed club Sunday, January 3 at midnight (Saturday night); watch "The Bayou: DC's Killer Joint" on WHUT.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

WBJ's Editor-in-Chief Douglas Fruehling announced in Note to readers: We are ending our TechFlash email newsletter a number of changes. In addition to the TechFlash news, Tina Reed's portfolio will be expanded, Andy Medici will cover additional topics, and James Bach will cover things I just don't understand. Read the piece for the details.

In Fairness Rising, follow the amazing men and women of People for Fairness Coalition - an advocacy group of unhoused and formerly unhoused individuals - as they fight against the odds to win housing for all.Then, in Raise to Rise, experience D.C. General from the inside as a brave mother raising her two-year-old maintains a secret iPhone diary of their time at a shelter notorious for its uninhabitable conditions and structural neglect.

The event also features a Q&A with the film-makers.

Space is limited. The event is free, with a suggested donation of $7.00.

While the podcast Leveraging Twitter for Nonprofit Initiatives dates to 2014, the ideas shared by Caroline Barlerin, Head of Twitter for Good, and HandUp director of business development Sammie Rayner are still spot-on. So take 40 minutes to listen to this podcast.

Do you need old illustrations? Check out Old Book Illustrations, a site where you can find all manner of old art drawings―animals, buildings and monuments, landscapes and places, narratives, ornaments and patterns, people, and more.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Diane Rehm joins Carol Joint at the Thursday, February 11, 2016 Q&A Cafe at the George Town Club (1530 Wisconsin Ave NW). Expect Rehm to talk about her career, life, retirement, and her new book On My Own. The event will start at 1:00 pm with seating starting at 12:30. The fee is $35; call the George Town Club to make a reservation, (202) 333-9330.

Every Little Bit Counts: The Impact of High-speed Internet on the Transition to College (PDF) by Lisa J. Dettling, Sarena F. Goodman, and Jonathan Smith (the abstract: "This paper investigates the effects of high-speed Internet on students' college application decisions. We link the diffusion of zip code-level residential broadband Internet to millions of PSAT and SAT takers' college testing and application outcomes and find that students with access to high-speed Internet in their junior year of high school perform better on the SAT and apply to a higher number and more expansive set of colleges. Effects appear to be concentrated among higher-SES students, indicating that while, on average, high-speed Internet improved students' postsecondary outcomes, it may have increased pre-existing inequities by primarily benefiting those with more resources.")

Come and join us for a light brunch and have a candid conversation with the authors of the seminal book on District politics and government - Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington, DC - which was republished last year as a 20th Anniversary edition. What do authors Tom Sherwood and Harry Jaffe think about the District’s stature and outlook now, 21 years after the publication of their chronicle of corruption and decline? What is the state of race relations and politics in the nation's capital? What has changed for better or for worse and what remains unchanged? Is the District in decline today, or are we on the rise?

Approximately 600 children (and their parents, grandparents, etc.) are relying on Santa―the Brentwood Post Office―to fulfill their Christmas wishes this year.
The post office needs our help to make Christmas morning a happy one. According to Dana Wyckoff, from Friends of Rosedale Library, "one little boy wrote this is the 2nd year he's asking for something, since he didn't get a reply last year."

There are various ways to help.

You can fulfill all or part of the requests in a letter

Swap out more general age-appropriate gifts (book, hat and gloves, doll, socks)

How to make this happen: With your driver's license in hand, go to Brentwood Post Office (900 Brentwood Rd NE) Monday - Friday, 9:00 am - 3:00 pm, Saturdays 9:00 am - Noon. At post office, ask for Sherry/Secret Santa Helper. When you return the gifts, they must be gift wrapped, marked with the number of the letter, and returned to the PO in a sealed mailing box (with number of the letter on the outside) NO later than Monday, December 21. Donors pay for mailing (though they sometimes waive that if you're donating a lot).

An unprecedented look at the financial lives of working Americans and new insights for designing policies, programs and products that can help make their lives better.

There’s no question that the American economy has undergone dramatic change over the last 30 years—stagnant wages, rising inequality, automation, freelancing, and globalization. The impact of these economic changes on the lives of low- and moderate-income Americans has been difficult to see, until now. New research indicates that current programs and policies for helping families escape poverty, build stability, move up the ladder, and invest in the future are based on an outdated understanding of what their financial lives looks like—one that no longer reflects reality.

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In this complimentary two-part SSIR Live! webinar series, researchers from New York University and the Center for Financial Services Innovation, will be joined by experts from the Aspen Institute, and Pew Charitable Trusts, the University of Michigan, and the Urban Institute to present new research findings, their implications, and insights for designing new policies, programs, and products to help improve the lives of low- and moderate-income Americans.

74% of single-parent households, 55% of households with children, 54% of renters and 73% of households with no education above a high school diploma live in liquid asset poverty in the District.

18% of the District’s population receives the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), but only 4% are utilizing free tax prep services to receive their refund.

12% of District households do not have a checking or savings account—nearly twice the national rate. So, nearly 32,000 households are more susceptible to using alternative, often predatory, financial services. Even among those households that have bank accounts, a full 25% still relied on alternative financial services, such as check cashing or payday loans in the last year.

Family Assets Count is a project of CFED (the Corporation for Enterprise Development) and the Assets & Opportunity Initiative along with Citi Community Development, Capital Area Asset Builders (CAAB), and United Way of the National Capital Area.

Friday, December 4, 2015

The District of Columbia was not one of the 50 communities selected as a Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion grantee but there is much we can learn from the national and local partners starting with ways to reduce the tobacco use and smoke exposure.

DC has taken numerous steps to reduce resident, worker, and visitor exposure to smoke but more can be done. Young people continue to experiment with smoking. According to the 2012 OSSE report District of Columbia PROMOTE. PREVENT. PROTECT. Youth Risk Behavior Survey (PDF), 5% of middle school students reported having smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days and 14% of the high school students reported having smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days. And the number is likely higher; surveys relying on self-reports are known to under-report.

If you are interested in tackling this important public health issue, read the Partnering4Health project's Where You Live, Work and Play Should Be Smoke-Free, below.

Nationally, one in every nine households (11%) in American cities with 200,000 or more residents are unbanked. This means that people don't have a checking or savings account. Those unbanked in DC amount to 11.8% of the population. Regionally, 4.3% of the population is unbanked.

There is deeper meaning to this data. Consider how much more powerful the DC Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) could be when claimants have bank accounts. Unbanked tax filers, according to Brookings' Alan Berube and others, commonly use high-priced refund loan products. Berube et al. also write,

In the Washington, D.C. area, taxpayers claiming an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) of $1,500 spend, on average, more than 10 percent of this amount on tax preparation, electronic filing and a refund loan if they use a commercial tax preparer. One local preparer’s prices were typical of those for national chain preparers: $60 for preparation of a federal return with the EITC, $34 for a state return, $20 for electronic filing, and up to $90 for a refund loan, for a total of $204. (The Price of Paying Taxes:How Tax Preparation and Refund Loan Fees Erode the Benefits of the EITC (PDF))

In 2002, University of Michigan Law School's Michael S. Barr testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs about the unbanked. In a related essay, he described the high costs:

Basic financial services cost a lot. Without a bank account, people must rely on check cashing establishments. In 2000, the FDIC estimated that a worker making $12,000 a year would spend $250 to cash paychecks.

Saving is hard without a savings or checking account. "Bill Gale of the Brookings Institution has shown that, after controlling for key factors, low-income households with bank accounts were 43 percent more likely to have financial assets than households without bank accounts."

"the unbanked are also largely cut off from mainstream sources of credit necessary to leverage their hard work into financial stability. Without a bank account, it is more difficult and more costly to establish credit or qualify for a loan. A Federal Reserve study found that a bank account was a significant factor - more so than household net worth, income, or education level - in predicting whether an individual holds mortgage loans, automobile loans, and certificates of deposit." (Banking for the Unbanked (PDF))

I think the answer for why trigger warnings exist is pretty simple. There is a desire to protect people from harm, even if it's psychological harm.

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I'm going to say the one thing that needs to be said about this, but that no one will utter. If you need people to put trigger warnings on everything for you to live your live normally, then there is a place for you to go. It's called a mental hospital, and it's where people go to get stabilized. If you are the kind of person who'll see a dick pic online and then go to the closet and hang yourself, then you aren't healthy enough to be living in the real world.

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In creating a world of trigger warnings, you also create a world where people are less able to deal with hardship. We learn how to endure and prepare for certain hardships by reading about them in books or seeing a character overcome them in a movie. It is through encountering the unexpected, that we can become inoculated against it.

DC Public Library Foundation compiles a list of books each quarter. The curated list is an insider's guide, a look into what the staff are reading and enjoying. Subscribe to Lit Picks for the list along with a discussion of "a variety of zany topics at the intersection of literature, art, technology and pop culture."

Sign up for the free newsletter; previous editions are on the sign-up page.

The session is grounded in Nonprofit Vote's new report, Engaging New Voters: The Impact of Nonprofit Voter Outreach on Client and Community Turnout (the report will be released December 2). According to the organization,

One of the report's key findings is that when nonprofit staff and volunteers help their community members to register to vote or to sign a pledge to vote, those individuals turn out to vote a higher rates than other registered voters, regardless of demographic factors like age, race/ethnicity or income.

Want to learn more about trends in digital? Interested in exploring the platforms were most useful for effective digital campaigns in 2015? Want to learn from recent successful movements and nonprofit campaigns?